Reich Brothers Buys Industrial Campus on Houston Ship Channel

Baytown Intermodal Center. Image courtesy of Reich Brothers Holdings LLC

National industrial real estate investment group Reich Brothers has acquired the former 1.2 million-square-foot DHL Intermodal Campus in Baytown, Texas.

The 67-acre property is in Cedar Port Industrial Park, the nation’s largest rail- and barge-served industrial park, adjacent to the Houston Ship Channel, providing easy access to I-10. The campus comprises four buildings ranging from 200,000 to 400,000 square feet, with 6 acres dedicated to paved container storage.

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The site offers service to both the BNSF and Union Pacific rail lines, along with an on-site capacity of as many as 350 rail cars.

The site is in the same business park and in close proximity to corporate neighbors such as Home Depot, Walmart and Ikea.

The four buildings feature clear heights from 28 to 40 feet, more than 100 dock-high doors in total, rail loading doors, an on-site barge dock, renovated office space, ample auto and trailer parking, as well as upgraded fire protection systems.

Reich Brothers reportedly plans to make “a significant investment in site improvements” to further enhance the property’s functionality for distribution, rail and port-related logistics, and manufacturing uses.

In a prepared statement, Matt Reich, vice president of acquisitions at Reich Brothers, noted that the Port of Houston has become the country’s number-one region for exports and leads the nation in foreign waterborne tonnage, putting turn-key warehouse space there in high demand.

Reich Brothers did not respond to Commercial Property Executive’s request for additional information.

Records being broken

The Houston industrial space market ended 2021 with a record-setting 28.6 million square feet of net absorption, in addition to which the construction pipeline swelled in the fourth quarter with 6.1 million square feet of project starts, according to a recent report from CBRE.

In addition, container volume at the Port of Houston was up 16 percent, to about 3.2 million TEUs (year-to-date through November), compared with the year-end 2020 figure of roughly 3.0 million TEUs, itself a record, CBRE reported.

Last February, an affiliate of Walton Street Capital acquired a newly completed 805,600-square-foot sort center in Katy, Texas, that is fully occupied by Amazon.